Artist and activist iO Tillet Wright is helping to smash stereotypes

iO Tillet Wright (that’s pronounced ‘eye oh’ if you’re wondering, not ‘yo’ or ‘woah’, which she sometimes gets) is a born-and-bred New Yorker. She’s also an artist. A photographer. An activist. An anthropologist. iO is a thousand different things and not one of them defines her entirely. But as a kid she was not so sure.

You see, iO grew up as a boy. After being told she couldn’t play basketball one day in school she went home, shaved her head, and was kinda reborn. For eight years, iO “kept up the charade” – not telling her classmates or teachers, even turning her shoes around in the loo cubicle to look like she was peeing standing up.

“My understanding of my own gender is ever-evolving,” she says today from her new home in LA. “But back then, in the ’80s and ’90s, I lived in a really rough situation, just me and my mum alone in a really fucked-up neighbourhood downtown, so I think it had a lot to do with me trying to be ‘the man of the house’.”

In what iO calls “the bubble of New York” she was allowed to grow into her self-ascribed identity with little judgment and although she turned super girly at fourteen (after puberty hit) and kind of zig-zagged through different gender identities until she was comfortable with who she was – something she calls “a tomboyish girl who likes girls and boys depending on the person” – iO was never forced into one box or another. She was given the freedom to find out exactly who she was.

It wasn’t until Proposition 8 – a constitutional amendment passed in California in 2008 that revoked the right to same-sex marriage – that she realised other people weren’t really given this same freedom. “When Prop 8 happened I felt this very intense sense that people stealing rights from other people was wrong,” says iO. “I started to really think about what the disconnect was and how I could help.”

Being a photographer, iO started shooting the people in her bubble – friends, acquaintances and peers – who didn’t fit the narrow confines of what society deems as ‘straight’. “My story didn’t play into it at the beginning,” she says. “I was just a camera. And my goal was to just show people other people that they haven’t met before and be like, ‘Look at them! Can you really vote against them? We are you!’”

Organically, that rallying call turned into Self-Evident Truths – a photographic document of 10,000 people in the USA that identify as anything other than a hundred per cent straight. “I have now visited seventy-seven cities in thirty-nine states and I’ve shot 8,468 people,” says iO, not missing a beat. “I want to illustrate two things: one is the ludicrous nature of the law,